The alarm clock brought Karp up out of confused dreams. He tried to cling to the dream state before it faded—something about Oswald, a lineup of Oswald clones in some dark police station, Karp peering into each identical face in turn, all smirking, a feeling of imminence, of some disaster that would strike if he couldn’t pick out the real one. Men standing around, impatient, important, and there was something about Marlene in there too… .
“What’s wrong?” This was from Marlene herself, warm in the bed beside him.
“What? Nothing, I’m just getting up.”
“You were groaning.”
“Oh! Was I? I was having this weird dream.” He told her about it, as much as he could remember, and then shrugged and laughed. “I have Oswald on the brain.”
“Your subconscious is trying to tell you something,” she offered sagely. “This guy you found … what’s his name … ?”
“Caballo.”
“Yeah. You think he’s the double. Maybe the real hit man.”
“Oh, crap, maybe, who knows?” said Karp, stretching, but reluctant to leave the warm bed for the barely heated bathroom. “V.T. said maybe Oswald was his own double,” he added sleepily. “Whatever that means. I’ll believe anything at this point.”
Marlene rolled over so that her face was above his. “Actually,” she said, “I’m Oswald.”
“You are?”
“Yes, I had a sex change operation right after the shooting, and also plastic surgery and secret drugs to make me younger. Then, I manipulated you into marrying me, and the master conspiracy organized your entire life so that you would be picked for this job, where I could thwart the investigation by draining your vital bodily fluids.” She demonstrated some draining action on his mouth.
“If you’re really Oswald,” he asked, “how come you give such good head?”
“Oh, puh-leeze!” she crowed. “Look at the pictures of him, or me, that is! Is that every ten-dollar male hustler you ever saw on the Deuce?”
“I guess you’ve got me there … Lee. Well, this is certainly going to add some piquancy to our sex life from now on.”
“Speaking of which,” she said, wriggling her upper body onto his chest, “what time does your flight leave?”
“Eight-twenty.”
“Oh, good, we have time for a quickie.” She threw a hot thigh over his midsection. The oversize T-shirt she wore to bed had ridden up and Karp could feel the amazing heat of her sex pressing against his hip.
“I guess this means you don’t hate me anymore,” he said among the kisses. She straddled him and set herself up, bouncing lightly on the tip before the first delightful drop.
“No, I still hate you a little,” she said, “especially since you’re running off to bask in the sun.”
“I’m not basking,” Karp objected, not very seriously. “It’s business.”
“Don’t be silly, you’ll bask your ass off, while I’m stuck in the freezing rain, but as you can see my hatred has fallen below my fuck threshold,” she said, and then she said, “Aah!”
“Well, this sure as hell beats chasing muggers through the sleet on St. Nicholas Avenue,” said Clay Fulton brightly. They were driving across a sparkling Biscayne Bay on Broad Causeway in warm sunlight, Fulton at the wheel of the rented Pontiac, Karp beside him, studying a road map.
“Make the first right you can, onto Bay Drive,” said Karp.
“Hey, I been here before, remember? Nice neighborhood,” Fulton observed as they drove down a street lined with palms and clipped bushes flowering pinkly with oleander and hibiscus. “We’re in the wrong business.”
“Yeah, we should’ve been mobsters,” Karp agreed. “On the other hand, he probably suffers from skin dryness due to overexposure to the sun’s rays. It’s a trade-off.”
Fulton made a turn and pulled to the curb. “Okay, this is it, we’re here.”
Karp grabbed a battered cardboard folder and stepped out of the car into the bright warmth of the street and the odors of flowers, hot stone, salt water.
It was a small stucco house, two-story, colored sun-faded pink with white trim. There was a low wall around the property, topped by a tangled bougainvillea vine. They walked through a wrought-iron gate and entered a small courtyard that contained a kidney-shaped pool, some chairs and loungers, a round table with a Cinzano umbrella stuck through it, and a redheaded woman in a yellow bikini, sunning herself on one of the loungers.
She lifted her sunglasses and peered at them, squinting. She was leather brown from the sun and her skin had the smooth and slightly oily look of an old saddle. Karp judged her to be in her late thirties. She had the sort of lithe body you get if you danced professionally in youth and you work out a lot after youth has fled.
“We’re here to see Guido Mosca,” Karp announced.
The woman cupped her hand around her mouth and shouted, at surprising volume, “Hey, Jerry, you got visitors!” Her vowels were from south Jersey. She gestured to a pair of white-painted steel chairs with flowered cushions, and said, “Have a seat.” They sat and she went back to reading The Racing Form and working on the tan.
In a few minutes, they saw a glass door at the back of the house slide open, and Guido Mosca walked out onto the flagged patio. He was a medium-sized man in his early seventies, with a deeply lined face, small, bright eyes set close together, and a wide lippy mouth. He was bald save for a fringe of silvery hair, and his skin was the same tanned-leather color as the woman’s. They might have been sprayed out of the same can.
Mosca approached them and shook hands without smiling. His eyes flicked toward the woman, who ignored them, and he said, “Come on, I’ll show you around.”
They walked around the side of the house down a narrow path lined with crotons, and out onto a lawn facing a broad channel, a large island park with a golf course in it, and the bay. The property was small but well maintained: the lawn green and crisp under foot, the bordering shrubbery clipped square. There was a little dock with a white powerboat tied to it under a striped awning. It was the kind of modest setup that might have belonged to a small and successful businessman in his retirement. Which Mosca was, in a way.
A white wrought-iron umbrella table and four chairs sat on the lawn. When they were seated, Karp said, gesturing to the place, “So, Jerry, you look like you landed on your feet—nice house, a boat. What’s the secret of your success?”
“I kept my nose clean, my mouth shut, and I put a little money away. Look, what’s the deal here? Tony says I got to talk to you guys and go testify.”
“Yeah, provided you have something we need,” said Karp. “Why don’t you start by telling us what you were doing in New Orleans in 1963?”
Mosca leaned back in his chair and played with his lower lip. “Sixty-three, sixty-three … okay, sixty-three I was working in a crew with Jackie Colloso and Chick Fannetti. We had some money on the street, also some girls, punch cards, like that.”
“This is in Marcello’s outfit?”
“Yeah, Marcello. He was the capo there.”
Fulton asked, “Jerry, so how did a Philly boy get to be working for Carlos Marcello?”
“Out of Cuba. I used to go down there a lot when it was open, the fifties. I took care of some things for Trafficante, as a favor, you know? And he offered me a job, watch his interests in some of the casinos. And while I was there I met Sam Termine.”
“This is the one who worked for Marcello?” asked Karp.
“Worked for Marcello. Yeah, he was his driver and, like, his bodyguard.”
“You ever meet Termine’s friend, Dutz Murret?”
“The bookie, right? Yeah, later he was a, like a client.”
“Meaning you collected for him.”
“Yeah, later, when I was with Marcello, him and the other bookies.”
“Did you know his nephew?”
Mosca nodded, slowly, as if realizing that this was the point of the whole thing, the nephew of an insignificant part-time bookie for the New Orleans Mob. “Lee Oswald. No, that was before my time, when he was a kid, hanging around in New Orleans. Sam Termine knew him, though. Sam used to go with his mother.”
“So, you met Termine in Cuba,” said Karp, switching back. “What happened then?”
“Well, Castro took Cuba, we had to get out. Traffìcante asked me to stay. He couldn’t leave because Castro wouldn’t let him. They were gonna put him on trial or something. So some of his people got some big shit-load of money up, then Jack brought it in, and I gave it to some Castro guys, and we flew out that night. After that—”
“Wait a second,” Karp interrupted. “This was Jack who? The bagman …”
“Jack Ruby,” said Mosca blandly. “Worked for Carlos as a bagman at the time, and then he ran a nightclub in Dallas.”
“I know who Jack Ruby is, Jerry,” said Karp. “I was just surprised that he was the guy who bailed out Trafficante. Okay, go ahead.”
“After that, I worked for Trafficante for a while, and then one day, must’ve been the summer of sixty-one, Termine calls me up and says there’s something going down, they want to get some of the old Havana fellas together, could I come. So I ask the boss about it, and Trafficante says he heard about it too, and yeah, I should go. They’re gonna whack Castro, they need muscle for the job. So I get to New Orleans, and I see Sam and he introduces me to a guy, Johnny Roselli, out of the Chicago outfit. He’s setting the whole thing up. He’s talking about how the CIA is behind the deal, which doesn’t make me feel too fucking relieved, because look how they fucked up the invasion, you know? He asks me can I do a machine gun, can I do a bazooka. Right then I know this is gonna be fucked up, but what can I say? It’s a contract. Okay, so Roselli says the CIA guys want to see us, we’re supposed to go to such-and-such a bar at such-and-such a time and they’ll pick me up. So Sam and me go out and we end up at this bar we were supposed to be at, I think it was Armand’s on St. Charles. And we see Dutz Murret and we sit down at a table with him, just shooting the shit, waiting for this CIA guy.”
He stopped and looked at Karp, a faint smile on his face. “You know, it’s funny you asking me about Dutz just now, and Oswald, because what happened was, this guy walks in the front door and looks around, and Sam spots him and says something like, ‘Holy shit, Dutz! There’s your nephew.’ And Dutz looks over and he kind of jumps and starts to get up and then when the guy gets a little closer he says like, ‘Nah, it ain’t him. Besides, he’s in Russia, the little prick.’ Then this character spots me and walks over and says his name’s Caballo and I should come with him, and he notices Dutz is staring at him and he asks him if something’s wrong, and Dutz says, ‘No, but you’re a ringer for my sister-in-law’s kid,’ and Dutz tells this guy how Lee had gone over to the commies in Russia. Okay, then we got up and—”
“Wait a second, Jerry,” said Karp, and brought out an eight-by-ten print made from the Depuy film. “Is this him?”
Mosca studied the photo, holding it at a distance from his face in the manner of elderly men who need glasses.
“Yeah, that’s the guy.”
“What was your take on him—then?” Fulton asked.
“Caballo? Just a guy. Hard kid, though. If I didn’t know he was G, I’d’ve said he was one of ours, you know? Anyway, we left Armand’s and he drives me to this motel out on Hayne by the old airport. There’re some guys there in a room, Roselli, a couple guys I knew from the old days, Cuban muscle.”
“Names?” said Karp.
“Oh, one of them was Angelo Guel, used to work out of the Hotel Nacional, ran girls, the other one—I can’t recall his name—Chico something. And then there was the government guy, Bishop.”
A quick look passed between Fulton and Karp. Karp pulled another photograph from his folder. “Is this Bishop?”
“Yeah, that’s him,” said Mosca after a quick look, and Karp felt a jolt of elation. Mosca had identified a photograph of Paul A. David. Karp spread out several other stills from the film. Mosca picked out Angelo Guel as one of the men who was riding in the jeep, confirming Veroa’s ID.
“So anyhow,” Mosca continued, “Bishop starts in with these charts and plans and shit, how we’re gonna whack Fidel. He’s got this tame Cuban to rent a place that’s got a clear shot of this platform where Castro’s gonna give a speech. The Cubans are supposed to go over in a boat at night and land the gear, and some other Cubans’re supposed to take the stuff to Havana and set it up in the apartment. So while he’s talking, I’m thinking, How come these guys need us, they got the whole thing figured. So I ask them.”
He paused dramatically, until Karp said, “And … ?”
“Deniability,” said Mosca, pronouncing the word carefully in a tone touched with sarcastic contempt. “Deniability is they’re using Cubanos we used as muscle around the casinos, they got Roselli to front it, which means Giancana and Chicago is in on it, and Santos is in on it, with me there, so whatever happens the government’s in the clear. It’s a revenge hit from the outfits, Castro flicked them so bad, you know? Horseshit, but that’s the plan. So I say to Bishop, ‘Yeah, but you’re involved, you got people there in Cuba, the guy who rented the apartment for the hit, that’s your guy. You’re the CIA.’ They all looked at me like I laid a fart or something. Bishop says, ‘Who said I was CIA? I’m not CIA.’ Then he gives me this line that he’s representing some businessmen who want to see Castro whacked. Anticommunist types from Texas.”
“You didn’t believe him?” asked Karp.
“Hey, the fuck I know! Roselli sure as shit thought he was working for the G. He was fucking proud of it. So we bullshit some more. They tell war stories. Roselli’s got all these schemes he tried to get Castro. A poisoned cigar, stuff to make his beard fall out. Totally fucked up, it sounds like to me. The Cubans are saying all about being in on the Bay of Pigs deal, why it went wrong and fucking Kennedy, how he fucked it up, they would’ve taken over if he’d’ve let the bombers work over the commies. Bishop was on the Bay of Pigs too, he says, and they’re all crying in their beer what a shame it was. I’m getting bored here, listening to all this crap, so I ask Roselli when we’re gonna do him, Castro, and what’m I supposed to do. Sometime in October, he says. So, I say, that’s two, three months from now, let me know when you’re ready, and I get up to go. They say, wait, we gotta do a picture for your passport. So they take some Polaroids of me and Guel. Then Bishop says they’ll be in touch and I shouldn’t talk to anybody about it.” He smiled. “Like I got a big mouth, you know?
“Anyway, I get back to my hotel, I right away call and leave a message for Santos at this phone booth we use and about an hour later, he gets back to me. I tell him, Santos, these people are fucked up. I say, hey, you want to whack Fidel, I’ll get some people together, we’ll go there and whack him, but these people, especially Roselli, they’re a fuckin’ joke. Santos, he laughs, he says, yeah, he knows that, nothing’s gonna happen to Fidel, but we got to stay involved with these fuckheads because whatever goes down, we got a piece of the government’s ass forever, they’ll owe us to the next pope. So that makes sense, so I go back to Florida and wait. Next thing, the end of September, I get a call from Caballo, the thing’s on, get my stuff and go down to the airport, the commercial terminal. They got this plane there, a little private jet, I never been on one of those things before. Guel’s there, and Caballo. Caballo’s not coming but he gives me this envelope. It’s got money in it, American and Cuban, and tickets for a regular Cubana flight out of Mexico City and phony passports for me and Guel and for this other guy we’re supposed to pick up in Mexico City. The passports were perfect, but, why not? These guys are the government, right? And we take off. You guys want a beer? No? Well. I’m gonna have one.”
Mosca got up and went to the house. Karp said to Fulton in a low voice, “This is real, right? I’m not having a wet dream?”
“If you are, I’m in it too, son. This guy is from heaven. He IDs Bishop as David, he puts Paul David together with a guy who’s a ringer for Oswald, and puts Guel with Bishop way before the film, before the assassination even, and they’re all sitting around jiving about what a bad guy JFK is. I love it! All we need now …” He fell silent as Mosca returned, clutching a can of beer.
“So. No problems in Mexico City,” Mosca resumed after a long swallow. “We fly to Havana and—”
Karp interrupted. “Who was the guy you picked up in Mexico City?”
“I don’t know. I never seen him before. He didn’t give his name.”
“Okay, go ahead.”
“Havana. We make contact with Bishop’s Cuban, the guy who’s setting up the apartment we’re gonna shoot from. Name’s Tony something, Verana …”
“Veroa,” said Karp. He showed another photograph.
“Yeah, that’s the guy, Veroa. Anyway, I check the setup and it’s complete amateur hour. There’s one escape route. One! We’re gonna have to run down eight floors after we do the job. He got us two cars, but no switch cars, which means we’re gonna have to race to this dinky port where there’s a boat waiting for us, he says, with every cop and soldier in Cuba looking for us, in the same goddamn cars we left the apartment in. Plus, the jerkoff rented the fucking place in his mother-in-law’s name, so of course he has to get her out of the country before the hit, only he finds out the Cuban cops are looking funny at the boat he’s supposed to use and he gets nervous and, of course, Guel and the other Cuban get even more nervous, and they call the thing off the day before it’s set to go. And that was it, the story of the great hit on Fidel. Assholes!”
He finished his beer and was silent for a moment, looking out at the water. “Veroa takes off in the boat with his mother-in-law, Guel and the other guys disappear, and I fly back to Mexico and then Miami. Santos had a big laugh over it. I say to him again, like, Santos, you want Castro hit, I’ll put some guys together, we’ll do it. A bomb is what I would’ve used, none of this bazooka crap. But he says, I got to check with Giancana, it’s his thing, the thing with Roselli and the G. Which is fucked, because Miami’s open, it don’t come under the Chicago outfit, why should Santos give a shit what Giancana thinks? But I figure, what the fuck, they got some kind of deal working on it, I don’t need to know about it. It ain’t my affair. Meanwhile, after that, Santos is telling everybody he’s gonna get Castro, he’s in on the hit, it was all horseshit as far as I could see, but you know Santos, he likes to blow smoke like that.”
Karp thought of something Veroa had said and asked, “Jerry, tell me one thing. Did you ever get the feeling that the Castro thing was a scam, that Bishop and the other CIA people didn’t really want to hit Castro?”
Mosca shrugged broadly. “Hey, the fuck I know! Like I said, I didn’t think it was a serious operation, from what I saw. And Fidel’s still around.”
“Did you ever see any of these people again?” Fulton asked. “Bishop, Caballo, the Cubans, or the other guy, the one in Mexico City on the plane?”
Mosca thought for a while, and then nodded, looking directly into Fulton’s eyes, with a cynical smile on his wide mouth. “JFK. That’s what this is all about, right? Well, the fact is, I don’t know squat about any of that. You guys are out of luck.”
With some effort, Fulton kept the confusion he felt from appearing on his face, and said casually, “Yeah, we understand that, just tell us what you do know.”
“Okay, along about sixty-two, late, I got into a situation in Miami, we thought it would be good if I spent some time out of town. So Sam Termine arranged I could work with one of Marcello’s crews for a while. I’m there a year or so. So, one night, this is like fall of sixty-three, me and Sam and a couple other of the fellas are standing around outside Gella’s on Canal and a bunch of guys get out of the car and start walking down the other side of the street. Sam looks over at them and waves, and one of them walks across the street and comes over to us. First thing I think, it’s this guy Caballo, but no, it turns out this is the real Oswald. He shakes with Sam and then Sam introduces him to me. So they bullshit for a while, how’s your mom, like that and then Oswald goes back across the street. But while he’s talking, I’m looking over at the guys he’s with; they look, like, familiar, you know? And I see it’s the bunch from the Castro thing, Guel, and another Cuban shooter we had in Havana, name of Carrera, and the other guy, the third guy from the plane. It stuck in my mind because here’s three guys connected with a guy who’s a ringer for Oswald, and here they are with the real Oswald. Funny, huh?”
“Yes, it’s real funny,” said Karp through a drying throat. “Um, this third guy. Can you describe him?”
“I don’t know,” said Mosca with a shrug. “Just a guy. Pretty well put together—looked like he could handle himself in a fight. Didn’t say much. I remember he had thick, wavy hair like those old-time movie stars.”
“And you don’t remember his name?”
“No, like I said, he didn’t give it.”
“But you were with him on the plane ride and for most of the week planning the Castro assassination,” Karp persisted. “You must’ve called him something.”
“Oh, yeah. When I gave him the phony passport, I said, That ain’t your name, is it?’ And he looks at the passport and says, ‘It is now.’ So we called him Frank.”
“Frank what?”
“Frank Turm.”
“Term? Like a prison term?”
“No, it sounds like that, but on the passport they spelled it T-U-R-M.”
Karp wrote this down on his pad, his hand shaking with excitement. “Um … one other thing, Jerry. What was PXK?”
A puzzled frown passed over Mosca’s face. “What? What is that, like a company?”
“Maybe. We don’t exactly know. It’s come up in connection with what went down in New Orleans back then. Maybe this Turm guy was involved in it.”
Mosca shook his head. “I never heard of it. Like I said, I just saw the guy twice.”
While Karp was writing, Fulton asked, “In Havana, Jerry, what was this Turm guy supposed to do. He was one of the triggers?”
“Nah, he was like the organizer. Like I said, this Veroa character didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground about how to set up a hit. Turm was supposed to be the detail guy: who went in what window, timing, getaway, the cars, the hideouts. We talked about it a little. I got the feeling he did it a couple times before, down in those South America countries.”
“But the hit never came off,” Fulton objected. “If he was such a pro, how come he didn’t fix it up?”
“Yeah, well, that was another fucked-up thing about it. We get to the airport in Havana and Turm says he’s got to make a phone call and he’ll catch us later, and that was the last I saw him, until that night in New Orleans.”
Marlene had seen so many movie images of the red stone house on L Street that it looked entirely familiar when at last she saw it in real life. She was sure that with no help at all she could have found her way around inside it, almost as if it were a house she had lived in as a child. The mistress of the house, Selma Hewlett Dobbs, had aged more perceptibly than the blood-colored sandstone, being made of a softer material, but not that much softer, as Marlene found out a few minutes into her interview.
They were sitting in the old study at the rear of the house, a room Marlene recognized from the films, of course: his study. It looked unchanged, like a room in a museum. The books in their cases were neatly ranked and dusted, the bay windows that gave on the small back garden were clean, the desk and an oak filing cabinet and the other furniture were polished, gleaming dully in the thin light, and smelling faintly of lemons. Mrs. Dobbs sat at her husband’s desk, facing Marlene, who sat in a leather chair before her. She was being dressed down.
“Miss Ciampi, is it? I want you to understand that I have not given an interview since my husband’s death and I would not be giving one now had not my daughter-in-law asked me to see you. I think it was unwise of her to involve a stranger and I told her as much. Maggie is prone to enthusiasms about people that may overcome her judgment.”
The voice was firm and vibrant with the accent and timbre made famous by Katharine Hepburn. There was a Hepburnesque look about the woman herself, Marlene thought: cheekbones like rails and a sharp little chin. Her eyes were blue and bright, although the once red-gold hair had faded to a grayish dun. It was combed straight back with a bun. She was sixty-five and looked ten years younger.
“I’ll try to justify her confidence, Mrs. Dobbs,” said Marlene.
Mrs. Dobbs’s face reflected doubt, but she nodded and said, “Very well, let’s get on with it. What is it you wish to know?”
Being a good interviewer of people who had something to hide, Marlene was not about to reveal what she wished to know. Instead, she began by giving something. “I spoke with Harley Blaine recently,” she began.
The other woman’s eyes blazed. “What! Who gave you permission to do that?”
“Maggie gave me his private number. I didn’t realize permission was required.”
“Decency is what is required,” Mrs. Dobbs shot back, distaste in her voice. “Harley is dying. He has cancer. I will not allow him to be disturbed in the service of some harebrained project designed to stir up unpleasant and painful memories.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Dobbs. I didn’t realize you were so opposed to Hank’s attempt to clear his father’s name.”
“My husband does not need to have his name cleared!” Mrs. Dobbs exclaimed. Twin bars of color had appeared on those cheekbones, glowing like neon tubes.
Marlene drew a deep breath and let it out. She said calmly, “Um, look, I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here. I’m not a journalist, I’m not trying to pry into anything. I’m not getting paid for this. I’m an unemployed mom who used to be a pretty good lawyer and Maggie asked me to do her a favor on this background investigation for a book Hank is planning to write. The last thing I want is to get into a family wrangle. So, you don’t want to help, fine, I’ll leave this minute and I’ll go back to McLean and tell Hank and Maggie you don’t want to help and then the three of you can duke it out.”
For a long moment Marlene met the glare of Mrs. Dobbs’s steel blue eyes with her single black one and the impervious glassie. Then Mrs. Dobbs turned away and favored Marlene with a view of her strong profile, limned by the garden window. When she at last returned to speech it was with a far softer tone. “I’m sorry. I should not have spoken to you like that.” A long sigh. “My only excuse is that the events surrounding the accusation of my husband are so painful, even at this long remove, that I am not quite in control of myself.”
Marlene nodded sympathetically, thinking, however, that lack of control did not seem to be one of Mrs. Dobbs’s big problems. Mrs. Dobbs now put on a surprising smile, showing white perfect teeth, the smile familiar from the early Dobbs films. “Would you care for some tea?” she asked.
“I’d love some.”
Mrs. Dobbs rose and led Marlene, not to the door she had come through, but under an archway to the right of the desk, which led to a short hall and another exit from the study. This hall was fitted out as a little gallery, lit by bucket lights overhead, the walls covered from the wainscot to nearly the ceiling with framed pictures. Mrs. Dobbs paused to point out the more interesting ones. Most of these were of ancestors, in yellowed formal poses, bearded gentlemen and blank-faced plump ladies looking like upholstery. Selma’s father the governor. Richard’s father the senator. The ladies and their children were represented in posed shots taken by society photographers: Richard at various stages of childhood with his mother; Selma, the same, with brothers and sisters, retouched so as to obscure any excursion from well-bred perfection. Displayed with the photos were a Civil War general’s commission for a Dobbs ancestor; a coat of arms; a family tree for the Hewletts; a certificate from the DAR; a framed display of medals on blue velvet.
Marlene examined with interest two photographs that seemed to contain no Dobbses at all. One showed Harley Blaine in western gear with a white Stetson, seated on a horse, under a rustic wooden arch bearing the name of his Texas ranch. In the other, Blaine was posed smiling in front of an oriental-looking statue of a lion in company with two other grinning men, both younger, both with crew cuts and thin ties.
“This is Mr. Blaine,” Marlene said, pointing at the group shot. “Who are the other men?”
“I haven’t any idea,” Mrs. Dobbs replied after a brief look. “Richard hung these here. It’s one of the photos Harley sent him when he was overseas, after the war.”
“He stayed in the navy?”
“The navy? Oh, no, Harley was never in the navy.”
“But I saw them in the films, Mr. Dobbs and Mr. Blaine, all through the Pacific war, in Pearl Harbor, out in the Solomons… .”
“That was what I believe they call ‘cover.’ Harley was one of Bill Donovan’s young men. He was in the OSS during the war. And in the CIA afterward.” Mrs. Dobbs walked away down the hall. Marlene shut her gaping mouth, took a deep breath, and followed.
They went to the kitchen, a dim room with worn checkered linoleum on the floor, a long white enamel table at the center, twenty-year-old appliances, and numerous cupboards and larders painted thickly in dun paint. It was the sort of kitchen meant to be worked by a staff.
“The girl is out,” said Mrs. Dobbs, as if confirming this impression. “We’ll have to fend for ourselves.”
They fended, and then, seated in a small stuffy parlor, they drank their tea from thin china cups with a rose pattern, and munched delicately on thin butter wafers.
The two women chatted in a civilized fashion about Washington life, the Dobbs grandchildren, Marlene’s family. Mrs. Dobbs seemed anxious to use what charm she possessed to repair the initial impression she had made, not, Marlene thought, because she cared a whit for Marlene’s opinion, but because she had, by that transient rudeness, departed from her own rigorous standards of polite intercourse.
Marlene brought the conversation back on track, steering it from family, to friends, to friendship in general, and then to a particular friendship. “Mr. Blaine and your husband seem to have had a particularly close relationship.”
“Oh, close isn’t the word. Sometimes it seemed as if they were two parts of the same person. We used to joke about it in those days, that I’d gotten two for the price of one.”
“Mr. Blaine never married?”
“Oh, yes, he did, briefly, right after the war. It didn’t last. He traveled a good deal, of course, and it must have been lonely for her here in Washington. A Texas girl. It was hard for her to fit in.”
I’ll bet, thought Marlene. Not into this little triangle. She asked, “They met at Yale? Your husband and Mr. Blaine?”
“Oh, no, much earlier—at prep school, St. Paul’s. I believe they were nine or ten. Harley’s parents were killed in an automobile accident in Mexico. When Richard’s parents came to pick him up at the end of the term, Richard announced that Harley would be part of the family from then on. And they went along with it. Richard could be quite bull-headed when he wanted something. Harley’s only relatives were a set of grandparents who weren’t much interested in rearing a boy. And of course there was plenty of money. It was such a typical thing for Richard to have done.”
“He was generous?”
“Oh, yes, to a fault. An open, generous, noble man. That was why it was so absurd to have accused him of spying. He could hardly keep a surprise party secret.”
“But I thought he was in naval intelligence in the war,” said Marlene.
“Oh, that!” replied Mrs. Dobbs dismissively. “That wasn’t anything like spying. Richard was based in Tulagi at first and collected information about Japanese movements in the Coral Sea and the Solomon Sea. He had a network of coast watchers, supplied by submarines and PT boats. That’s how he won his Navy Cross. One of his people had been discovered by the Japanese and he led an expedition to get the man off the island he was on. They went out in PT boats and rescued the coast watcher, and Richard stayed to the last moment with a few other men, holding off the Japanese until they could get the agent off the beach. Of course, he wasn’t authorized to do any such thing, but that’s the sort of man he was. He knew his duty and he did it, whatever the personal cost. Harley, of course, was a different sort of man entirely.”
“You mean, you might have believed it if Mr. Blaine had been accused instead of your husband?”
“Not at all. If anything, Harley was more intensely patriotic than Richard. I meant his character. He was much … darker than Richard. Closed. I think he was very isolated in childhood; his parents were apparently not terribly interested in raising him, the sort of people who believe that lavish presents and the best schools are a substitute for love. I suppose it was natural for him to become a spy. After the war, Richard went to work for the secretary of the navy and Harley stayed on at CIA. Of course, we saw a great deal of him. Richard was intensely social. Harley called him one of the great politicians of his generation.”
“Was he interested in actual politics?”
“Oh, my, yes! He was planning a campaign for the House in New Haven, for the 1952 election, when he was accused. Harley was to be his campaign manager. They used to sit up nights in the study, plotting. They joked that Richard would be president first, and then he’d pick Harley as his successor.”
“Was that a real possibility?”
“They certainly thought it was. Joe Kennedy’s money bought the presidency for his son, and between them Richard and Harley could have given the Kennedys a good run. Besides which, Richard was twice the man Jack Kennedy was. He was a real war hero, not a phony one. He wrote his own books. And he was not obsessed with bedding every woman he ever met. Yes, I think that if things had worked out, Richard Dobbs would have shown very favorably against John Kennedy. They knew each other, of course, on Tulagi. And Richard liked Jack, but you know, Richard liked everyone, but he certainly wasn’t taken in. How did he put it? Bright enough and charming as the devil, but essentially corrupt and with all the character of an earthworm. And naturally, he knew the true story of what happened with that PT boat.”
“What happened?” said Marlene, fascinated.
Mrs. Dobbs smiled. “Oh, it was a story he used to tell, at parties and such. I wish I could tell it the way he did.’ Mimicking that silly Kennedy accent. How this fine upstanding boy, this bootlegger’s child, in command of the fastest, most maneuverable surface vessel in the history of naval warfare, on a clear night with visibility of over a mile, on a calm sea, managed to get himself run down by a Japanese destroyer. Well, naturally, they were all asleep, with the radio off. Failure to keep watch, I believe it’s called, a court-martial offense, but of course nothing was done to him, and he did save those sailors afterward. It made a good cocktail party story, but it would have been devastating if Richard and Jack had gone up against one another. Richard wouldn’t have said a word, but Harley would have made sure everyone knew. I used to think how odd it was, and how sad. Instead of Richard and Harley, Jack and that dreadful Lyndon. I don’t think the country has quite recovered.”
They were silent for a moment. Mrs. Dobbs poured another round of tea. Marlene decided it was a good moment to get the conversation closer to the bone she was after.
“Speaking of Harley, do you know anything about what he did in the war, the spying part?”
Mrs. Dobbs gave her a sharp look. “How is that germane to our discussion?”
“I don’t know if it is,” said Marlene with a casual shrug. “You tell me. Two men whose lives have been intertwined since childhood. One of them is accused of spying, the other one is an actual spy who defends the accused. I think Mr. Blaine’s character and career are important to a consideration of what happened back in 1951. But that’s up to you, what you want to tell me.”
After a brief pause, Mrs. Dobbs nodded and said, “Well, I don’t suppose Harley would mind at this late date. He certainly was quite free in talking to Richard, and as I said, Richard was famous for not keeping a secret. Richard told me all I know about this. Harley was, as I said, recruited into the OSS right after law school and operated in the Pacific. He was a talented linguist. He spoke fluent French and he knew Japanese and Chinese, which was quite rare in those days. He spent some time in Saigon, posing as a Vichy Frenchman, spying on Japanese shipping. Then he was in the Philippines, and after the war, I think he was in Japan operating against the Soviets. I don’t know why he left the Agency. Half-seriously, he used to say it was because he missed seeing us. That’s really all I know.”
“Then it must have been his CIA contacts that enabled him to learn about Gaiilov.”
Mrs. Dobbs stiffened in surprise and her teacup clattered in its saucer. “You know about that?”
“Yes, Mr. Blaine was very forthcoming when I spoke to him. He described a prison meeting in which he laid out the Gaiilov situation for you and Mr. Dobbs, and Mr. Dobbs told him to go ahead if it wouldn’t hurt the country.”
“Yes, of course, and Harley assured him it wouldn’t. Apparently, Harley was involved in bringing Gaiilov over to our side, so he ought to have known. Allen Dulles was insane with rage about it. He never spoke to Harley again, and I understood at one time they were quite close. Well, he’s dead, and so is Richard, and so are the men who accused him, and Harley’s dying. He won’t let me see him, you know?”
“Who, Mr. Blaine?”
“Yes. He says he wants me to remember him as he was. When we were young and full of hope, as he puts it.” Mrs. Dobbs fell silent again and Marlene saw that her eyes were brimming. “You know,” she said in a strained voice, “I am suddenly quite tired. I wonder if we could continue this at some later time.”
“Of course, Mrs. Dobbs. I’d like to come back, if I may, to look through any material in Mr. Dobbs’s study that may be relevant.”
The older woman nodded and said, “Yes, yes, as you like, although I imagine Hank took everything years ago.”
Marlene rose and put her pad and pen away in her purse. “One last thing. What you just now mentioned, that all the people involved are dead. That’s what makes it so hard to collect information on this project. I was wondering, do you know what happened to the Russians? Reltzin. And Gaiilov.”
“Gaiilov? I have no idea. Reltzin probably lives right here in Washington.”
“He does?” asked Marlene with surprise. “How do you know that?”
“Because I see him nearly every week during the concert season. He is a music lover, as am I. We have been nodding to each other for almost twenty-five years, although we have never exchanged a word. He even sent me a card when Richard died. I think Richard would have found that amusing. Harley certainly does.”
“He knows you’ve seen Reltzin?”
“Of course. He would have told you if you’d asked him.”
But Marlene had, and he hadn’t.
Driving back to Virginia in the yellow VW, Marlene considered what she had learned so far and her options. It was clear that Blaine had lied to her, about being CIA, and about how he had learned about Gaiilov, and about Reltzin being returned to the Soviet Union, and she didn’t know why. He was dying, apparently. Why bother hindering the amateur investigation of an ancient case? Maybe his mind was going and he couldn’t keep the old lies straight anymore. In any event, she had gone as far as she could with the accessible material and informants. Moving further would take serious investigative work, full-time work, and that, she had to admit, she could not really accomplish all by herself, and certainly not as an unpaid hobby. It was a lot easier doing investigations when you had a couple of thousand cops behind you.
“How did it go?” asked Maggie when Marlene at last arrived at the Dobbs home. “You don’t seem to have any visible claw marks.”
“I think it went well,” said Marlene. “We had a nice conversation about the case, and about your late father-in-law. And Harley Blaine. Tell me, do you know Blaine at all?”
“Mmm, I’m not sure. He’s a hard man to know. He has that perfectly opaque front that guys of that generation cultivated, charming, hail-fellow, slightly boozy, courtly manners. He used to come into town every Christmas with crates of expensive presents. Now the birthday and Christmas presents come by mail. I got the feeling he wanted to be sort of a foster dad and grandparent around here, but he didn’t have the … I don’t know, emotional energy, or whatever. We haven’t seen him for a couple of years, although Hank flew out there a couple of months ago. He’s very ill, I think.” Then she asked, hesitantly, her voice thin and nervous, “Was she angry that I gave you his number?”
“It didn’t come up,” Marlene lied.
Parking her car in the Federal Gardens lot, Marlene noticed that the next bay was empty. She recalled that she had not seen the old pickup truck owned by Thug ‘n’ Dwarf for several days. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t seen either of the pair around since an unusually violent fight three nights ago, and she hadn’t heard any country music through the party wall either. This was odd, because their dog had whined throughout the previous night. Holding Lucy’s hand, she walked from the parking area to the back door of the couple’s apartment and pressed her ear against the peeling paint of the door. All she could hear was a faint mewling sound and a rhythmic scratching thump. She peered through the back window into the small kitchen, a dirtier replica of her own, except that several of the cabinet doors hung open and one of the kitchen chairs was lying on its side. She put her ear to the window. No sounds but the persistent scratch-thump-scratch-whine.
Entering her own apartment, Marlene settled the napping Lucy in her bed, then dialed the manager’s office. The manager was a lazy redneck who had a reputation for shakedowns and hustling single mothers short on the rent. The phone rang fifteen times before she slammed it down. Federal Gardens was not a high-service establishment. She could, of course, hear the same lugubrious noises through her walls. The dog was obviously still there.
She bore it for ten minutes, pacing, smoking, and then with a curse she grabbed a table knife from a drawer and dashed out. It took less than a minute to pop the cheap lock on the back door of Thug ‘n’ Dwarf’s apartment. She slipped inside.
As she had suspected, the place was abandoned. The refrigerator held only a few condiments, a moldy package of sliced bologna, and half a stick of butter. The living room was merely filthy and disordered, but the large bedroom bore the signs of serious fighting: a smashed lamp, holes in the plaster, chairs broken, and the bed torn apart. All the drawers had been pulled out of the bureau, and one of them had been flung against the wall hard enough to smash it. If Marlene had been made to guess, she would have said that the couple had engaged in an ultimate argument, Dwarf had cleared out while Thug was at work, and he had come home, observed this fact, taken out his rage on the place itself, and then made his own escape. Leaving the dog.
Who was locked in a closet in the small bedroom.
“Ah, you poor baby!” she cried when she opened the door, and then she drew back, gagging. The beast was lying in its own filth, ribs staring, its black coat matted and dull. It had obviously been half-starved for a long time and deprived of water for days at least. Marlene ran back to the kitchen, put the bologna and the butter in a bowl, filled a small pot with water, and carried both back to the dog. It lapped up the water. The food disappeared in two great gulps. Then it stood up and walked slowly on shaky legs out of the closet.
Marlene drew in her breath. The animal was huge, well over two feet high at the shoulder, with a great, sad-eyed slobbering head. She judged it to be the result of some ill-advised mating between a St. Bernard and a black retriever.
Cautiously, Marlene patted its head. It licked her hand, coating it all over with hot dogspit.
“Come on, Buster, let’s get you cleaned up,” she said, tearing the cord from the shattered lamp and tying it to the dog’s chain collar. It followed her docilely next door. She found Lucy awake and curious.
“What’s his name?” was her first question when she saw the dog, and then, “Why does he smell so yucky?”
“I don’t know his name, dear, and he smells bad because he hasn’t had a bath in a long time. That’s what we’re going to do now. Go run and get your baby shampoo.”
Marlene tied the dog to a pipe outside the kitchen and washed it with bucket, scrub brush, and Johnson’s No More Tears, and dried it with a cheap chenille bath rug she found in a closet. The dog bore this with admirable patience, lapping at puddles, but otherwise staying still. After the bath, it looked a lot better, shiny and bearing, absurdly, the scent of a clean, small child. When it shook itself, its skin flopped about in a peculiar and disconcerting manner, as if it had been sold a suit two sizes too large at the dog store. Its damp coat steamed in the chilly air, giving it the appearance of a hellhound, albeit a sweet hellhound. Big too, very big, and from the disproportionate size of the paws, planning on becoming bigger still. Marlene wondered if she was making one of her famous mistakes.
“Is he our dog now, Mommy?”
“I guess. Do you like him?”
“Uh-huh. He looks like the Peter Pan dog, but black. Could he baby-sit me when you go out?”
“Maybe. Let’s go inside, it’s too cold out here.”
They went into the kitchen, where the dog downed another quart of water, an elderly Big Mac from the fridge, and four eggs beaten with milk. They all then adjourned to the living room, where the animal plopped himself down in front of the couch where Marlene and Lucy sat, tongue lolling and looking absurdly grateful.
“He looks like Uncle Harry,” said Lucy after studying the dog for a while.
“Gosh, you’re right, he does,” agreed Marlene, laughing. The dog’s face—its sad, intelligent eyes and its general air of battered dependability—was the image of the detective, Harry Bello. “Lucy, you know, I’m glad you reminded me. How would you like it if I asked Uncle Harry to come down and visit?”
“Uh-huh,” said Lucy distractedly. “His name is Sweetie.”
“Who, the dog?”
“Uh-huh.” The dog licked the child’s face, throwing her into a fit of giggles. “He likes it.”
“If you say so,” said her mom.
Arriving at Miami International Airport a few hours after Karp and Fulton, the man who called himself Bill Caballo rented a car and drove west on the Tamiami Trail, out past where the Glades began, until he came to the enormous gun shop that is one of the landmarks of the area. There he paid $435.95 plus tax for a Remington Sportsman 78 bolt-action rifle, with sling, mounting a Tasco 40-mm 4 x scope. He also bought a cheap .22 revolver, a box of .22 long rifle cartridges, a box of 308 Winchester Super-X cartridges, and a bottle of insect repellent, paying cash for all his purchases. He also paid in cash for an hour on the range behind the shop, where he zeroed the rifle until he could put three rounds within the diameter of a half-dollar coin at two hundred yards. He fired a dozen or so rounds from the .22 also, to see if it would fire reliably, which it did. He was not concerned with its accuracy.
Leaving the gun shop, he drove further along the Trail and found a junk market, where he bought an old golf bag and a miscellany of unmatched clubs. He put his new rifle in the golf bag, and bought a meal at a nearby diner.
He then took the Trail to 1-95, went north on that freeway to 922, and then took that east across the Broad Causeway, exiting at the Indian Creek Golf Course. He parked and walked around the southern edge of the golf course with the bag slung over his shoulder. He did not look very much like a golfer, but attracted no particular attention. Indian Creek is a public course and they get all kinds there.
He sat down in a mass of scrub behind a large cabbage palmetto, and smeared himself liberally with insect dope. Then he waited. Night fell. He dozed in short snatches. The sky turned gray, then became streaked with red, then the palest possible silvery blue, flecked with small clouds. He stretched and pulled his rifle out of the golf bag, wiped the scope, inserted four rounds into the magazine, and chambered one of them. He crawled around the side of a palmetto and lay prone in the short grass and looked through his scope at Guido Mosca’s house.
At around six-thirty, Guido Mosca, dressed in Bermudas and a flowered shirt, with fishing rod in hand, walked barefoot out of his house and onto his little dock. He did this every morning, although he rarely caught a fish, and he saw no reason to interrupt his routine simply because, in a few hours, he was scheduled to fly to Washington to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He would have plenty of time to get ready, he thought, which in the event was untrue, because as soon as he reached the end of the dock he was shot once through the heart from across the wide channel.